7
Hybrid Deployments
Now that we've discussed the different architectures for EUC brokers let's look at how
they're being deployed. Despite some predictions that all workloads are going to public
cloud, it's clear that most deployments are still on-prem and that most organizations are
moving toward using a hybrid architecture. For the purposes of this discussion, hybrid
simply refers to a mix of on-prem and public cloud. The percentages vary for each
depending on a number of factors. When it comes to hybrid in the EUC world, there are
ways it works for both traditional and DaaS offerings. Let's first look at how each of the
architectures can fit in a hybrid world and then dive into some sample use cases.
The DaaS solution is the most common approach to hybrid offerings, and not all DaaS
vendors offer the ability to deploy in a hybrid architecture. The control plane typically
remains in the cloud for the DaaS version of hybrid and those that support it have a
method to control and manage the private resource pools, usually by deploying a local
VM on your on-prem clusters to act as a local connector. Through these cloud connector
VMs, the DaaS provider can now provision VMs, control their power states, and broker
connections to them. The connector VMs are easy to set up and you can deploy them
in a pair to provide HA. This is the architecture that Citrix CVADS, Horizon Cloud and
Nutanix Frame support.
Overall, the DaaS version of hybrid is still far less complex to design, deploy, and operate
than the traditional approach. You're still responsible for managing the infrastructure the
on-prem VMs are running, but you don't have to manage the broker layer.